and abroad. The nation must
expand economically. This expansion, which is broader than what is
usually called imperialism, is not a merely political process. It
takes small account of national boundaries, but develops farming
wherever possible.

The movement is vast and intricate: Commerce {78} between industry and
agriculture is carried to the outermost parts of the earth; Africa is
divided up, colonies, dependencies and protectorates are acquired;
agriculture is promoted in politically independent countries, and an
internal colonisation, a colonisation within one's own country, occurs
simultaneously. In Australia, the Canadian West, in Argentine, in
Siberia settlers lay virgin fields under the plough, and the new lands
are bound commercially to the great complex of Western industrial
nations.

They are also bound psychologically. As the machine which conquered
the nation now conquers the world, so the spirit of Manchester and
London and of Pittsburgh and New York rules ancient peoples, breaking
up their rigid civilisations, as it rules naked savages in the Congo
forests. It is a materialistic, rationalistic, machine-worshipping
spirit. The unconscious Christian missionaries to China, who teach the
natives not to smoke opium and not to bind the feet of their women, are
unwittingly introducing conceptions of life, as hostile to traditional
Christianity as to Confucianism or Buddhism. They are teaching the
gospel of steam, the eternal verities of mechanics, and the true
doctrine of pounds, shillings and pence. Feudalism, conservatism,
family piety, are dissolved; and, as the conquering mobile
civilisations impinge upon quiescent peoples, new ambitions and desires
are created among populations hitherto content to live as their
forefathers lived. These desires are the inlet of the restless
discontent which we call European civilisation. When the ancient
peoples, civilised or not, desire guns, whiskey, cotton goods, watches
and lamps, their dependence upon Western civilisation is assured.
Bound to the industrial nations, they toil in mines or on tropical
plantations that they may buy the goods they have learned to want, and
that Europe may live.

{79}

In this cosmopolitan division of labour, which destroys the old
economic self-sufficiency of nations, England took the lead. A hundred
years ago, when the British agriculturist sold his produce to the
British manufacturer in return for finished wares, and fo